10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 6. Quad-Core Processors Provide Little or No Advantage for Mobile Systems

By eweek |
Posted 2007-11-12

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors

In November 2006, Intel introduced the first quad-core microprocessors for the volume x86 market. The quad-core chips were designed to offer better performance compared with the previous generation of single- and dual-core processors. A little less than a

While Intel came to market first with a quad-core processor, it did so essentially by tying two dual-core processors together on the same silicon package. AMD took more time to bring its quad-core chip to market but developed a manufacturing process that

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 2. The Advantage of Intel’s Quad-Core Proce

A 45-nanometer, quad-core Xeon processor is, on average, about two times faster than the previous-generation 64-nm, dual-core Xeons, according to new benchmarks released by Intel.

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 3. The Advantage of AMD’s Quad-Core Processor

A quad-core Opteron processor will offer, on average, a 66 percent performance increase compared with a dual-core Opteron processor, according to benchmarking results released by AMD.

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 4. Quad-Core Processors Work Best with Servers

Within an enterprise, servers remain the ideal platform for quad-core processors because the chips are designed to take advantage of the multithreaded software that runs within most data centers.

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 6. Quad-Core Processors Provide Little or No Advantage for Mobile Systems

Currently, neither Intel nor AMD offers a quad-core processor for laptops, although that could change by next year. That said, many analysts believe that most users want notebook processors that offer better battery life and less voltage, not more cores.

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 7. Quad Cores Are Better for Virtualization

As virtualization becomes more important and widely implemented, businesses will need servers with quad-core processors to help support more than one workload on a system and to supply the computing power to run multiple applications or operating systems

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 8. Quad Cores Can Help with Cooling, Consolidation

With more processing cores in each server, quad-core chips can help IT managers cut down on the number of systems each data centers needs.

It’s only a matter of time before vendors offer up the next big thing in processors. Sun Microsystems already offers an eight-core UltraSPARC processor for servers, and Intel and AMD each have plans to move to eight-core x86 chips as early as the en

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - 10. What’s Next for Quad Cores?

By 2008, both Intel and AMD will offer quad-core processors built on a 45-nm manufacturing process. This will increase performance while keeping the thermal envelope the same, allowing for performance per watt.

10 Things You Should Know About Quad-Core Processors - See More Slide Shows Like This One!